Melodie Edwards

Melodie Edwards graduated with an MFA from the University of Michigan on Colby Fellowship where she received two Hopwood Awards in fiction and nonfiction. Glimmer Train published “Si-Si-Gwa-D” in 2002 where it was one of the winners of their New Writers fiction contest. She has published stories in South Dakota Quarterly, North Dakota Review, Michigan Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse and others. She is the recipient of the Doubleday Wyoming Arts Council Award for Women. “The Bird Lady” aired on NPR's Selected Shorts and Prairie Schooner nominated the story for a Pushcart Prize. She has a story upcoming in an anthology of animal stories, published by Ashland Creek Press. She is the author of "Hikes Around Fort Collins," now in its third printing. She is circulating Outlawry, a novel about archeology theft in the 1930's with publishing houses. She is currently working on a young adult trilogy about a secret society of crows and ravens.

Melodie Edwards lives in Laramie, Wyoming with her husband and twin daughters. She and her husband own Night Heron Books and Coffeehouse. When she's not working or writing, she's love to putz in the garden, play guitar, hike and make pilgrimages to hot springs.

Western states are likely to be affected most by the Trump administration's proposal to roll back parts of the Clean Water Act. The Environmental Protection Agency would no longer give special protections to thousands of miles of seasonal streams and millions of acres of wetlands that often go dry by late summer in the arid West. That would leave states to decide whether to protect such waters themselves.

Thanks to improved health care, the Native American populations around the country are growing. But the number of homes hasn't kept up. That's especially true of the Northern Arapaho on Wyoming's Wind River Indian Reservation.

Northern Arapaho elder Kenneth Shakespeare raised seven children in a house with views of mountains and hayfields surrounding it. But now he has dementia and it's his kids turn to take care of him in the same four-bedroom, two-bath house they grew up in.

On the Wind River Indian Reservation in central Wyoming, there's not a single trained sexual assault nurse examiner.

Northern Arapaho tribal member Millie Friday saw how devastating that lack could be when her own daughter was raped by a close relative. Friday was left with no choice but to take her daughter to a hospital off the reservation.

"We went straight to the emergency room and from the emergency room, the FBI was contacted," Friday says. "So she never even had that choice of what she wanted to do. It was just straight in."